


oil and water

by Elendraug



Series: second go [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Doomed Timelines, Dream Bubbles, Game Over Timeline, Gen, God Tier, Paradox Space, Retcon Timeline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-13 16:43:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18035345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: no one said it would be this hard; how could I know?why do we always get so far before we let go?





	oil and water

**Author's Note:**

> warning for mild body horror of the pseudo-spiritual variety
> 
> it felt good to write for Aradia and Nepeta after all this time
> 
>  _this_ fic was brought to you by the corndogs I had for dinner while trying to get this done in time for 3/11, haha

_and we separate_  
_nothing is the same forever_  
_see you drive away_  
_wish I could make you stay_  
_oh,[oil and water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEC73fO2jB4)_  


Your name is ERISOLSPRITE.

Your afterlife has been spent thus far as a gaming abstraction, tasked with disseminating protips to players you could not give less of a shit about, and even the multiverse itself appears to have moved on without you. It was not your choice to be raised from the dead, but it pays to be friends with a psychopomp, out here sunk within the deepest pockets of unmade paradox space.

Aradia is radiant as she regards you, and part of you has always been in awe of her, while the other half at least knows to respect her regardless of her social hierarchy. 

“We may ask you to assist as these final loops draw to a close and we return this all to nothing.” She nods to you, as if what she just said made any significant sense. “But for now it’s okay for you to make your own happiness.”

You are ready to receive further instructions, to help chart some sensible path through the end of this nightmare. But Aradia is not alone, and her assistant emerges from the void dressed in the deep magenta of so much soul-searching, her eyes as white as the sugar-sands of her land, and her teeth as bright to match. 

“You’re a god tier?” you ask, and you try to keep the incredulity out of your tone, but you know she can tell. She could always tell more than she let on, or more than you cared to notice, and you resent yourself for this and so much else, as sidelined as she was in the cosmic game.

“Not in your timeline, of coarse.” Nepeta holds her hands out, upturned, and shrugs. “But other than being doomed, it seems like I meowstly got my act together in mine!”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” you ask, fearful, but not due to her abilities or lack thereof.

“Do you know what _you’re_ asking?” she counters, head tilted, inquisitive.

“He assured me he was sure,” Aradia supplies. “Is that still true?”

“I’m sure.” You nod, and your scarf should feel tight around your intangible throat, but it doesn’t, because nothing feels right like this. “I don’t want to be this anymore. I _never_ wanted this.”

Nepeta approaches you as you float before her in the darkness of the blank arena you all inhabit. “I can’t purromise I can set you back to normal, but I will do efurrything I can!”

She smiles at you, and you feel intense guilt for disregarding her when you were all alive; for writing her off and for hitting on her, her kindness itself a knife you’ve drawn on yourself now that you’re depending on her compassion for one to two people she had little to say to in the session, either as an acquaintance or as a server player who did her no shortage of disservice.

But you trust her, and so does Aradia, and that says enough for this long now in which you’ve found yourselves.

“Thank you,” you say.

“No purroblem!” she says, and you can’t hold the duplicate pun against her, not at a moment like this. She takes your glasses off your face and tucks one temple into the fabric of her cowl for safekeeping. “Are you ready?”

“Yeah. It’s now or never.”

Nepeta reaches towards your chest and drives her claws beneath your scarf, stabbed inside your conjoined symbol as she begins to disentangle you from within. She spreads her fingers from your ribs and outward, unspooling this Gordian knot like so much yarn, and flips the fibers of your being with the intuitive dexterity of a sketch artist to reform it into a new shape, a restrung cat’s cradle. You pull apart, molten green glass threading thinner as she separates you from yourself, a deliberate snag unraveling your own existence.

You’ve wondered what it reveals about you in your malaise that it’s taken outside intervention to part your pieces, when you couldn’t or wouldn’t initiate that schism for yourself. You’re left alone with your own thoughts, which never did you any favors when it was all you knew, and is now at once a relief and a reeling silence.

You feel like a fog, disjointed and disoriented, and you catch yourself on functional feet you haven’t felt in sweeps. Gravity unnerves you, and you land with mismatched soles, wavering from your own weight. You nearly drop to your knees, but Aradia is there with your hand in hers, stabilizing you as she always has, leading you forward to something better than all of this.

You’re vaguely aware of Nepeta offering similar assistance to the one who was formerly your worse half but now is nothing and no one you want to interface with any further. You stare steadily ahead, chin up, confident with Aradia’s fingers laced with yours. 

You’ve been halved and thus made whole again, and you fall forward into Aradia’s waiting arms. Her embrace is everything, the one place in which you’ve consistently found solace, whether she’s ethereal or mechanical. You sigh as she rubs your shoulder blades, tracing the bones of your back as you solidify.

Your certainty begins shaking as you see yourself alight from wherever he was and step into your field of vision, which seems to be more than he has, with empty sockets eyeing you warily.

You understand implicitly what his presence signifies, and you hide your face in her hair and close your eyes for two seconds. If time would refuse to march on, you would stay like this, but chronology was never your domain, and you know in your guts that end of your ephemeral respite is already here.

“I’m sorry,” you say, so accustomed to apologizing to her, so ready to return to it as a matter of course.

“You don’t have to apologize, but you can if you really want to.” Aradia brings her hands up to the back of your head, running her fingers through your hair, tracing up your two tallest horns. “I think you should spend some time doing what you feel like.”

“This isn’t her first time finding one of us.” The other you scoffs, but you know from being him that he can’t completely hate you, no matter what he says to himself. “You’re not the most embarrassing Sollux I’ve seen. At least you’re not trying to kiss her.”

You stifle the desperate, death’s door impulse you’d been contemplating, and keep your hands on her shoulders to steady yourself, mindful not to disturb the chitin of her wings.

“I told you she was very nice, didn’t I?” With your face cupped in her hands, she keeps her eyes on yours, bright with life, her hair smelling sweet with the divinity of death, and you are entranced by these esters. “So, where is it you would like to be?”

Your chest is tight, and you ache for the height of a hive stem, the honey-sweet smell of the city at night as you attend to your lusus, the comforting buzzing of servers that serve to support the smallness of your particular splinter of a life in so many offshoots of an infinite universe.

You falter. “I want to go home.”

“That’s what they say.” Aradia grins at you, overbroad, and she takes both of your hands in her own. “There’s no place like home.”

Eridan’s voice is aimless, adrift, and he adds without being asked, “I guess I’ll come with him.”

With your hands in hers, Aradia looks to him and smiles just as widely. “I think that would be best.”

“No.” You shake your head, jarred by the betrayal of it, the injustice of a scant separation before such a condemnation to confinement without any possibility of peace. “No, he can’t go with me.”

“These bubbles were provided to us for a time, for a reason, and at her behest.” Aradia’s assurance is convincing as she speaks, but you jolt forward, reaching for her, stunned and stumbling. She moves back to join the other you, who even you can admit is in much greater need of her arm looped through his, dependent on a guide through this furthest ring. “Just trust me, okay?”

The emptiness around you reconfigures into the familiar surroundings you were sure you had lost to the destruction of a demon when you were six sweeps old and waiting for the second of your many deaths. The roof begins restructuring over your head, closing in to encapsulate you. Aradia ascends through it, with the other you at her side. Nepeta forms her hands into a heart and smiles at you through the frame of her fingertips.

“AA, don’t leave me here with him.” You raise your voice as she flies away, her expression sheepish as she waves goodbye. You shout at her retreating form, at the movement of her wings. “Aradia!”

When the building has built itself and blocked your view, when you let go of the fists you’ve clenched your hands into, when you finally turn around, you see him standing there, given enough scarf to hang himself with, fumbling with the single pair of bright green glasses you wore in tandem, which you no longer want anywhere near your face. He looks up at you, but won’t speak.

For the first time in ages, your name is SOLLUX CAPTOR, and you don’t understand what the point of this is supposed to be.

What will you do?

[ **> Try to understand.** ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17629844)

* * *

#  [♫](https://genius.com/Interpol-interlude-2-lyrics)

SOLLUX: but then s0meb0dy pr0t0typed my c0rpse, which i guess sucked the gh0st half 0f me 0ut 0f my b0dy, t0 make me fully alive again? als0 fully blind.  
SOLLUX: and n0w the gh0st part 0f my s0ul is sharing a sprite b0dy with FUCKING ERIDAN 0f all pe0ple.


End file.
